Back in The Day, when shoulder-length hair on young men wasn’t a fashion but a declaration, people who were not Freaks would come up to us with a genuinely bewildered look on their faces. An exchange similar to the following would take place:

Them: “What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”‘

Us: “Whadda ya got?”

So it went and so it was. There was a lot of anger in the air in The Day, although few of us really had an idea of why. We just knew something was wrong and we were angry about it.

In Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend, Geoffrey Guiliano writes, “In ‘My Generation’ Townshend first released the anger and frustration he would never outgrow.”

I think Guiliano is right about Townshend and about many of us who grew up in the Sixties. We were and are angry; we’ve never outgrown it. A lot of us have, maybe even most of us, seduced by the comforts of capitalism and having made an unholy tryst with an ugly culture and mentality. But not all of us, even though we may have tried to do so.

I’m still angry.

“What are you so angry about?”

Well, I’m angry about Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister.

I don’t really know how old I was. I was old enough to remember the fire clearly and have vivid images in my mind’s eye, but I wasn’t old enough to know what was going on. I’ll guess that it was 1959, give or take a year.

One of my sisters woke me up in what seemed to my boyish clock to be the middle of the night. All she said was something to the effect that the Moore’s house was on fire.

The Moore family lived almost directly behind us, just across a one-lane dirt alley that separated the two sides of my supersized block in Terre Haute, Indiana. I don’t remember how many children they had: they didn’t have any boys my age so I didn’t pay much attention to them. Patricia and Anna, though, went to school with my sisters and were kinda friends. I knew them and thought they were cool.

When I got to the fire the two-story, wooden house was totally engulfed in flames. I remember the brightness and the heat given off, and a few mothers in the neighborhood who were holding their small children in their arms. It was probably winter but not very cold. Plus the fire was very hot.

I remember seeing Anna and maybe Patricia crying. I remember feeling bad for them: I sure didn’t want to think about my own house burning to the ground.

We didn’t stay long. We’d seen a lot of fires here and there in the neighborhood and the novelty of one so close to home wore off quickly.

I learned the next day that Patricia and Anna Moore’s little sister died in the fire. I don’t think I ever knew her name. A little while later I learned that it had taken the fire department forty-five minutes to respond to the first call. The fire station was one street over and one street down. Two blocks. Forty-five minutes.

A little girl died because the fire department didn’t come when they were first called. They waited.

Did I mention that this was around 1959?

Did I mention that the Moore family was black?

My town was racist back then; it may still be so. But that was one of the first things I remember that contributed to the anger and frustration I’ve pretty much always felt. The THFD took their time because they didn’t feel any sense of urgency to respond to a house fire two blocks away but across U.S. 41, the dividing line between blacks and whites in our town. I lived in a ghetto. I didn’t know it but I did.

It still makes me angry now, almost fifty years later. I recognize that the death of a nameless black girl has become a symbol of sorts for me, and that my anger is not just about her death. It’s about all the mind-numbing horror that has been dumped on people for years and years by people who ought to have known better. People who grew up when the U.S. was more Christian than now.

And I’m still angry because it’s still happening. The groups have changed, perhaps, but the inhumanity and hatred continue. Maybe we call them “illegal aliens” now and think of them as illegal but treat them as though they’re aliens. Non-human. Not capable of love or deep feelings or saving faith or devotion to Christ or any other thing that makes us human but not them.

The churches in my town were silent about the whole thing. Nobody thought it was usual. And what really gets to me even now, what almost brings me to tears as I write this and think about it, is that the black people in my neighborhood weren’t surprised either. They had come to expect it. It had been going on for years and years and years.

And I hated it and I still hate it and I’ll rage against it until the day I die. Or, I hope I die before I stop hating what happened. I’m angry.

“What are you so angry about? What are you rebelling against?”

“Whadda ya got?”



Namárië.